Since I was accompanied by my parents, this second weekend in Tuebingen was always going to be rather more sedate and rather less fun. We were all travelling out there together to celebrate my sister’s 21st birthday, and this time my mother had booked the flights, which were via Stuttgart and thus far less stressful. Stuttgart seems to be a small and quiet little airport, at least before 10am on a Friday morning. Quite why my mother had booked the flights for so early in the morning was something of a mystery. The weather in Britain had been so stormy during the preceding couple of days that a strong tail wind allowed our flight to arrive thirty minutes ahead of schedule and so it was that we found ourselves disembarking from the train in Tuebingen shortly after 11am.

The first thing we did upon arriving was very naturally to text my sister, who explained that she was in the middle of typing up an essay which she would then need to take into university to print and hand in. After that she was planning to do some shopping, have lunch and meet up with some friends at three for a birthday coffee and cake affair, but that she should be able to find time to meet up with us for a couple of hours once that was over, about half four. My mother wasn’t best pleased by this announcement, but she did have to bear the responsibility for it, having previously told my sister not to let us disrupt her normal routine. My sister had evidently taken this recommendation to heart.

It was cold and damp in Tuebingen, and we were all very cold and hungry. We went for a half-hearted walk along the Platanenallee before having a large pizza in what is apparently my parents’ favourite café. By this point it was gone two; that is to say, past the time at which we were allowed to check into the hotel, so we decided to do just that. It had been raining whilst we were eating and so my mother suggested we take a taxi from the railway station, where we had left our bags in lockers, to the Hotel am Schloss where we were staying. I was of the belief that this was somewhat unnecessary as it was at worst a ten minute walk but likely to run to a comparatively expensive taxi fare due to the one way and pedestrianisation schemes in place around Tuebingen. My mother explained that she didn’t want the suitcases dragged through puddles, so I offered to carry the heavy one (hers) and give Dad the light one (mine), but my attempts at thrift fell on deaf ears, and so it was that we arrived at the hotel in a taxi.

The journey was actually a bit hair-raising, because the drive up to the Hotel am Schloss commences via a very sharp turn up a steep and narrow cobbled street. The taxi driver was a woman, and I suspect formed the opinion that we were slightly mad; firstly for taking a taxi such a short distance with such a small amount of luggage, and secondly because my mother, in an attempt to convey how strange it was to be sitting in the front seat of a car which was travelling on the wrong side of the road, randomly announced “Ich denke, dass ich Taxifahrer bin”.

The Hotel am Schloss is a rather grand affair, one of the most expensive hotels in Tuebingen. It is situated at the top of a hill, adjacent to the very impressive Tuebingen castle. The rooms have views over the mediaeval old town or the Schwabian Alps, depending on which way you are facing. The restaurant is locally famous for being the best place to eat an authentic variety of the local speciality, Maultaschen, which I will describe later, and is correspondingly pricey.

We had two rooms booked, and the plan was for my sister to abandon her normal abode and come to stay in one of the rooms with me. Checking in without her, however, I was forced to make the all important decision as to which room out of the two we had booked she would prefer to stay in. The rooms were… erm… weird. I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels and I’ve never encountered anything quite like it.

Starting with the positives, they were both large and airy. one was bigger than the other, but they both had ample space for a sofa and arm chair. The smaller room had windows down the entire length of two walls of it, which were adorned with a peculiar set of beige and crimson drapes which later proved to be impossible to rearrange correctly. In the evening I spent a good twenty minutes attempting to manipulate them so that every bit of window was appropriately covered, and we still ended up with strange chinks of light coming into the room in the middle of the night. That aside, its main distinguishing feature was an enormous wood carving of the face of Eberhard (who founded Germany’s second oldest university in Tuebingen during the Middle Ages) which was hanging above the bed in a somewhat disturbing manner.

The second room was substantially larger and colder, and decorated in a bizarre pseudo-mediaeval way which I can only assume must have been chosen in a desperate bid to attract American tourists. The curtains and bedspread looked like they had come straight out of a re-enactment of King Arthur, but the most striking feature was the wardrobe. How to describe the wardrobe?! It was a flat-pack construction which looked suspiciously liked it might have come from the local branch of IKEA, and contained far more MDF than it did wood. This in itself would not have been remarkable, had the proprietors not employed someone to give it a mediaeval makeover. An artist of dubious credentials had covered it with a life-size portrayal of a couple with strangely distorted features, in a style that was so appallingly bad and un-lifelike that you were supposed to think it actually was mediaeval. It totally freaked me out, and for once I made a forceful decision that I was going to be staying in the other room!

The weather continued to be poor, so we sat in our respective rooms and used the opportunity to wrap all the presents for my sister which we had carried with us from the UK. The huge iPod speakers which my great aunt and uncle had bought for her had caused some confusion among the airport security staff earlier in the day. I only had a small necklace to wrap, so I sat in a corner and finished Der Teufel von Mailand, the truly excellent book which my sister had bought me for my birthday a week previously.

When my sister finally arrived it was nearer half five than half five. The reunion could have been strained, but the atmosphere was helped by the presence of 6 enormous 21 balloons which my Dad had blown up and I had gone round affixing to the curtain rails. There was a lot of catching up to be done, but my sister had arranged a get together of her friends for Friday night and needed to go to her place to get changed. My mother slightly bullied her into letting me come too, which was slightly embarrassing but ultimately very fun as her friends were all very nice people and because they were mainly international students, their German was in some cases not very much better than my own.

It wasn’t a late night but once we got back to the hotel my sister and I stayed up talking until gone one am, which led to me being rather tired for the rest of the trip, having got up at four on Friday morning.

It was slightly surreal celebrating my sister’s birthday abroad, but I think that she had a good time. My parents had bought her an iPod and various other people had given her money, which had been mercifully easy to pack and was much needed as her Erasmus grant has still not come through. She decided she wanted to spend the day taking us for a walk, and so we all wrapped up in the warmest clothes we could muster and set out. Behind the hall of residence where she lives there is a nature park called Schoenberg, an area of wooded hills which are protected under local law, and it was through this we walked towards a little village called Bebenhausen.

Bebenhausen, when we finally arrived at it, was quite a remarkable little place. The small village is the site of an ancient monastery which spreads over a considerable area and is still preserved in tact, having been captured during the Reformation and appropriated by the local kings for use as a hunting lodge. We spent over an hour wandering around it, looking at the different buildings and gardens, but being chilled to the bone, we soon retired to the one guesthouse establishment in the vicinity for a warming cup of coffee.

In the evening we had booked a table to eat Maultaschen in the famous hotel restaurant. It was a very small little place, with the tables so close together you could accidentally elbow the person sitting at the table next to you, and I quickly began to wish we had asked for a menu in English, being as the standard menu was written not in High German but in Schwabisch, the local dialect. Sometimes I think German dialects could really qualify as languages in their own right. One of my sister’s flatmates considers Schwabisch to be her mother tongue and dislikes being at university, where she is subject to the strain of trying to express herself in Hochdeutsch.

The Maultaschen, when they arrived, were quite strange. The only thing I can think of to sensibly compare them to is ravioli, but I feel this is somewhat of a disservice to them, as ravioli conjures up for me at least, horrible memories of school dinners, and these were actually rather nice. What you have to try to imagine is the filling from a sausage roll, wrapped in the pasta from ravioli, and being the size and shape of a small Cornish pasty. Imagine three of these on your plate, coated in a sauce of cheese, ham and tomato, and you should have a rough sort of idea. They were highly tasty, if somewhat filling, and certainly not likely to be a hit for anyone without a strong love of sausage meat.

In the evening we went out to explore the Tuebingen market. Tuebingen doesn’t actually appear to have a traditional German Christmas market of the type you might expect, but this weekend was a special chocolate festival and so a chocolate market had sprung up down the streets of the Altstadt, full of stalls selling different types of chocolate treats. There was delicious hot chocolate, which tasted rather like the chocolate river which Roald Dahl’s unlovable creation Augustus Gloop tried to drink from must have tasted, and stalls selling all manner of flavoured chocolates, with a strange preoccupation with chilli flavour. There were stalls were you could make you own chocolate, eat pancakes covered in chocolate, or buy large quantities of slabs of the stuff at knock down prices. And, of course, there was the obligatory smell of Gluehwein which seems to permeate every inch of Germany throughout December.

Sunday was kind of strained, because we all knew we were going home but were trying very hard to not let that thought affect our spirits. We had prearranged to spend the day in Stuttgart visiting the famous Christmas market there, but the itinerary was complicated by the fact that certain members of the family refused to entertain the idea of missing Mass on the Second Sunday of Advent. The Mass times in Tuebingen itself meant that if we waited to attend Mass there, it would hardly be worth going into Stuttgart at all. I thus spent half an hour on my sister’s internet, and managed to located a Catholic church in the middle of Stuttgart, no mean feat considering what a highly Protestant area it is. Mass was at twelve, which meant we had to leave Tuebingen at half ten at the latest. This wouldn’t have been a problem in any way, shape or form, except for the not so small matter of all my sister’s presents, which needed to be transported four miles across Tuebingen to my her flat. Breakfast wasn’t served in the hotel until eight, so it was nine before I was safely checked out and ready to assist her. The irregularity of bus times on a Sunday morning meant we were going to have to walk there and catch the bus back which was fine, except for the balloons. You can probably not imagine the embarrassment of walking four miles across an awakening city, carrying a bunch of enormous balloons! To say we attracted considerable attention would be an understatement.

Anyway somehow we made it there and back with no worse mishaps than me losing my pedometer down my sister’s toilet, and before long we were arriving in Stuttgart. The church I had chosen was mercifully close to the station, and the service was much more pleasant and easier to understand than the one I had attended in Tuebingen two weeks previously.

After an hour of strenuous praying, we felt in need of sustenance and set off for the Stuttgart branch of Vapiano. Vapiano is a chain of pasta restaurants which is represented across all the major cities in Germany, and is hopefully going to open in London very shortly if it hasn’t already. When it does, you have to go there! It’s trendy and pricey, but it’s such a strange experience you have to try it once. The premise behind the chain is that you get to watch your meal cooked right in front of you. When you go in they issue you with a swipe card, and then you take it to different counters depending on what you want. You can choose pretty much any type of pasta you can think of and combine it with a wide selection of sauces, then there are counters for starters, pizzas and desserts as well. You queue with your tray in front of a chef, tell him what you want and then he cooks it according to your specification, asking you how much onion you’d like and how much garlic he should put in and so forth. For fussy eaters like me it really is quite a exciting prospect to be able to tell the chef exactly which bits you want left out, and it’s also rather fun to see how quickly they can put the meal together. It’s true that you can end up standing in the queue for a while if the person in front of you has ordered something complicated, but on the whole I think the service is faster than you’d get in a more conventional restaurant and the food is really fantastic. One word of warning if you try it; on no account lose the swipe card that they’ve given you. You pay off your balance on the way out, and even if there are two of you and you’ve put all the food on one card, they need to be able to confirm the other card is unused, otherwise there’s a flat rate charge of fifty euros.

I had never been to Stuttgart before so I was greatly looking forward to it, but in matter of fact it was actually very difficult to get any sort of a feel for the place when it was literally suffocated by the Christmas market. Hordes of people thronged the streets, pushing and jostling in an excessively aggressive manner, and despite not being normally claustrophobic I began to feel quite uncomfortable with it. The streets seemed rather too narrow for the volume of people trying to pass down them, and it required real dedication to actually make a purchase from a stall. Added to that, I don’t think it was the best Christmas market I have ever seen. In previous years I have been to both Frankfurt and Cologne, and I think either of those wipe the floor with Stuttgart, if not in size at least in atmosphere and variety.

And then we had come unto the end again and there was one of those painfully sad goodbye scenes before we all bundled into the S-Bahn and away, leaving my sister standing forlorn on the platform. The journey back was unpleasant and I wouldn’t recommend that anybody ever fly with Flybe; I’ve used them three times and both times their level of customer service has been unacceptable. The first time I flew with them was to Edinburgh, and they informed us that my father had changed his ticket to fly to Malaga and that if he wanted to come to Edinburgh he would have to pay a fifty pound admin fee to change it back again. My father had not, of course, done anything of the sort, despite the fact they claimed they could prove it had been done on his card. The second time I flew with them was to Düsseldorf, and upon arrival back in Birmingham they randomly locked the entire cohort of passengers into a holding room for an hour with no explanation. On this third occasion, the plane turned out to be an hour late taking off, but there was no announcement or explanation for this at the airport, and no apology for it when we finally boarded the aircraft. Anyone who wants to fly anywhere should use Lufthansa; Flybe is not good value for what it is.

It was horribly lonely arriving home without my sister, but thankfully it’s nearly the Christmas holidays, and come next Thursday we will have her home and to ourselves for a whole two weeks

Tags: birthday, Germany, Tuebingen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Germany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.